The critical gaze of Vittorio De Agrò from the Zoo Palast

(from Berlin Luigi Noera with the kind collaboration of Maria Vittoria Battaglia and Vittorio D'Agrò of the editorial staff Ground floor– The photos are published courtesy of the #BERLINALE)

Edgar Reitz and his love for cinema

#Film hour23 is a documentary directed by Edgar Reitz, Jörg Adolph presented in the section #BerlinaleSpecial

Synopsis: In 1968 a classroom in a girls' high school in Munich is transformed into a film studio under the direction of the young Edgar Reitz. The cinema lesson begins: the first documented attempt in the history of cinema to teach cinematic aesthetics as a subject in its own right.

#Film hour23 di Edgar Reitz, Jörg Adolph – Germany 2024 | WP | DOC

Review:

Who writes to you, except rare and precious exceptions, he had little luck with the teachers at school.

It is equally rare for Italian schools to be capable of self-innovating by offering different teaching methods.

With this bitter awareness I faced the vision of "Filmstude" premiered in the "Berlinale Special" section of the Berlin Film Festival 2024.

I must also confess that when I saw the first images of a female German class in black and white, I feared the worst on a cinematic level.

A feeling that turned out to be wrong for a double reason: the documentary was not only in black and white and above all because after watching it I looked for more information on the project.

Imagine having among the subjects studied in high school also a course on the aesthetics of cinema and/or on the use of the camera. having as a professor a young filmmaker with great potential like Sorrentino or Garrone. And then almost 40 years of doing a sort of “Réunion”. It would be beautiful and memorable, It is not true?

Edgar Reitz before becoming Edgar Reitz for the film “Heimat”, she was a young filmmaker convinced of the need for cinema to enter German schools as an integral subject in the curriculum, opening the minds and stimulating the critical consciousness of future German generations.

“Filmstunde 23” is on the one hand the visual and verbal account of that first experiment with Reitz in the role of teacher in front of a class of happy students, excited and willing to learn something new and exciting.

On the other, a time leap up to 2023, finding the ninety-year-old Edgar Reitz, now famous all over the world , approached by an older woman who identifies herself as one of his students 1968.

If cinema is the story of an emotion taken from reality, the latter is capable of surprising us with continuous twists and turns.

From the casual meeting it is a short transition to a reunion between the "professor" and the "former students", now distinguished and smiling ladies.

The viewer finds himself watching a documentary within a documentary. An interesting and enjoyable alternation between past and present, between black white and color

We move on from Super films 8 filmed by each student to the testimonies and memories of the participants filmed by cell phones and the latest fashion cameras, during the meeting of 2023

Filmstunde_23 is a declaration of love for cinema that is perceived in gestures, faces as well as in the speeches of the protagonists of this story that began in 1968. A course that positively changed the lives of these women, having had the opportunity and honor of having Edgar Reitz as a professor.

For the elderly director it was further confirmation of the goodness and foresight of his educational and creative vision in schools.

Seeing “Filmstunde 23” also makes the audience in the theater want to attend a German school.

Vittorio De Agrò (RS) of the RdC editorial team